News
=Stalemate= Unfortunately, at the time of this posting (and for sometime before it), I, Neoteny, have not been able to dedicate the time I would have liked to this project. It was an ambitious move on my part to try and update this fossil of a wiki, and I still intend to do so. But between college, friends, and other projects, this has just fallen on the back burner and so, if there are any members of the Matrix Online who feel that they would be able to help take up this mantle, or even help write and edit an article here or there, please a) do not be afraid to do so without permission, and b) if you are more serious, e-mail me at bsquallguitarist (at) gmail (dot) com with your handle, server, and a paragraph of intent, I will be more than happy to promote you to administrator access. Or, if you'd like, I'm sure you can go over my head to the people at wikia to get access, too, which would be just fine in my eyes. This project just has enough potential that it shouldn't be cast aside the way it has been both by and before me. Signing out for now. Neoteny 04:48, 2 January 2009 (UTC) =A New Approach= Posted by Rarebit on 10/9/08 at 12:56:22 I'm going to try to keep this brief. I will have much more to say about the topics touched on here once this initial foray has been digested and thoroughly chewed over. Starting with subchapter 11.3, the content that you will receive in our regular six-week updates will be changing. For most of this year, updates have consisted of three main items: 1) weekly critical missions, 2) a replayable "quest," and 3) daily live events. This is going to change to: 1) a new cinematic, 2) quests with missions, activities, and rewards for each organization, based on the latest advancement of the story seen in the cinematic, and 3) an organization-wide meeting announced well in advance so that as many members as possible will be able to attend. Other, related changes will be taking place as well: - No more colored "EPN" or "CYPH" faction tags will be offered. Existing factions with those tags will keep them. - Archive reward items, such as the War Sword and Seraphic Vision, will have their timer extended to five minutes, and can be reactivated thirty seconds afterwards. - Completing a subchapter's worth of a single organization's archived critical missions (except for the very short subchapter 1.1) will reward an IS Booster item. - Neighborhood street gang bosses will have a 10% chance of dropping a reusable "RSI Capture" tool that will allow the player to assume that NPC's appearance indefinitely. - Organization "liaison officer" positions, played by LESIG members, will no longer exist. Some LESIG members will probably choose to keep their established characters, while others may recycle them for use in other events and activities. - We'll be throwing a game-wide party in a low-level-friendly area on one server each update period, announced well in advance. Reasons This change has both advantages and drawbacks as compared with the type of content we've been developing up to this point, but we believe that for the majority of current and potential players, this will be a step in the right direction. Those of you reading this, who follow the forums closely, also tend to be those who have most assiduously followed the daily events and weekly missions, and are perhaps the most strongly affected by these changes. While I cannot hope to replace perfectly the types of content you've seen in the past, I'll at least try to describe briefly the two main reasons why I believe this change is both necessary, and the right thing to do for the overall health of the game. 1) Long-term development While investigating ways to develop the game over the past year--missions, events, quests, and so forth--our development efforts have spread far and wide. Now we need to refocus our development into a concentrated direction that continues the story of the Matrix while also delivering new challenges and adventures in the Matrix Online over the long term. 2) Extending the reach of the story The story of the Matrix, as told through weekly missions and daily events, has become very detailed, and very complex. This has had an appeal for the story's most hardcore fans--those willing and able to put forth the considerable imagination and effort required to track the separate threads of the story across each week, each day, each organization, and each server, and weave them all into the overall narrative being told--but has been largely lost on more casual players, or those players dedicated to the pursuit of the latest and greatest gear. For what appears to be the majority of players--those who don't read over each mission, or each event--the story, as it has grown more intricate, has grown harder and harder to follow. Although all missions and events are archived, catching up on them is a significant challenge, and this difficulty has increased since the discontinuation of cinematics earlier this year. Cinematics have the power to bring any player--new, casual, hardcore--up to speed on the story instantly, and to bring it home in a very direct and compelling fashion. Furthermore, they allow the story to go places that missions and events--bound by game mechanics--cannot. This is why I believe that we need to devote time to bringing cinematics back, to combining organization storylines with gameplay that is challenging, varied, and rewarding in very definite, material ways for your characters, and to scheduling large-scale meetings where as many of our players as possible will be able to come together with their organization leaders to discuss policy and tactics. The heart of the ongoing game, from a development perspective, is the story that we have dedicated ourselves to carrying on, and we need to make it as meaningful and rewarding as we can. A few details - Cinematics will be hand-drawn, silent, subtitled .gif animations. They will play in the standard cinematic browser window in the Loading Area, but will load and begin playing back more quickly, and will not have the compatibility issues of the old WMV cinematics. They will be drawn and animated by me, and I think I will be able to make them longer and more dynamic than the old cinematics, although I expect the first one or two to be a little rough as I work out my production method. - The main-story quests will, similar to the Pandora's Box quest arcs, include mission phases, exploration phases, and collection phases. They will tend to take place in a specific neighborhood somewhere in the city, will require a minimum level of 30, and will feature new rewards for level 30, 40, and 50 players, sometimes specific to each organization, although you will also be able to trade the reward items if you wish. Level 100 Agent attacks on Zionites will be disabled in the target neighborhood for the duration of the subchapter, and afterwards will occur there at a decreased frequency. The quests will remain in the game permanently, so that you can always go back and revisit quests from previous subchapters simply by travelling to the right spot in the city, which will most likely be pointed out at the end of each subchapter's cinematic. - Organization-wide meetings will take place on a single server per organization. Which server hosts which organization's meeting will rotate every update. Meeting time and location will be clearly and publicly announced well in advance. The format will be--as closely as is possible--a roundtable discussion of the concerns and topics most relevant to the organization, in which the story's official organization representatives--Niobe, the Merovingian, Agent Gray, and so on--will need the input of their operatives. The intended model is something akin to the meeting of Zion captains held at the beginning of The Matrix Reloaded. This type of openness and flexibility was simply not possible under the old scheme of pre-planned, pre-scripted, daily and weekly events and missions. - The small-scale live events that we've been doing on a daily basis will still occur from time to time--in general, when specifically required by the main story. - The Cypherite and E Pluribus Neo organizations are returning to their original, "underground" status; their characters will still exist in the story, but we will not attempt to support them as player organizations with live quests or meetings; we have attempted to do so up to this point, but our development capabilities and existing game mechanics have never been able to do them justice. Their "parent" organizations (Machines for Cypherites, and Zion for EPN) will give these operatives full access to information, as if they were members of the parent organization. Players will not be restricted from forming new factions with "CYPH," "EPN," or similar, plain-color notation in their names, but the continued existence of the old gold or blue tags will lie solely in the hands of those factions who possess them at the start of subchapter 11.3. I will have, as I said, much more to say in relation to these changes, and I hope to be able to describe and discuss them with you at length once they've been widely read and assimilated. Please remember that, although we don't require you to agree with everything that is posted by us or your fellow players in these discussions, we do require that any discussion you conduct is done in a civil fashion. Okay, over to you. =Greetings!= Hello and welcome to The Matrix Online Wiki! Management has recently changed into my hands, which I hope those of you visiting this site will find capable. As any of you who have visited this site within the past 24 hours (or, as it would seem, better part of two years) have seen, this wiki has fallen into great disrepair, and it is a number one priority to fix it up. Many new terms will be added to the dictionary, many pages will be cleared up and made relevant, and many new pages detailing new information and the evolving storyline content of The Matrix Online will be added. I hope you will appreciate and come to view this wiki as a great source for information on The Matrix Online in coming days, and that if you are a knowledgeable player past or present of The Matrix Online that you will help contribute your knowledge towards this project. Thank you and, please, even if you do not feel the need to edit the page yourself, feel free to contribute criticism on any of the discussion pages contained herein. -Neoteny 12:54, 7 August 2008 (UTC)